The Darling

by Russell Banks

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Tell me the rest. I assume they did an MRI and CAT scan. And operated on him at once.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” she said brightly and brushed those old tears away. She smiled into her now-empty glass, plucked the cherry from it, and popped it into her mouth, sucked for a second, chewed, and swallowed. “Ralph Plummer, he operated that very night. Immediately. At Mass General. Ralph’s the best in the business. I stayed with Daddy all night, of course, except when he was those seven hours in surgery, and I’ve been right there by his bed most of every day since. He’s still at Mass General. In the intensive care unit. We’re trying now to decide where he should go next, Ralph and I and Freddie Rexroth, along with several of Daddy’s old friends and medical colleagues.”

  She continued her story, but I barely listened now. Between the instant that the artery in Daddy’s head burst and when he arrived at the hospital for diagnosis and treatment, more than an hour must have passed. I had enough medical experience and training to know what happened. While his skull was filling with blood, his brain was being compressed inside the skull case, cutting off the circulation of blood and oxygen to other parts of his brain, until the cells began to die and neurons started blinking out, darkness sweeping across his mind like a power failure spreading across a city grid, one neighborhood after another plunged into the gloom of permanent night. The prescribed treatment—a hole drilled in the skull, surgery to alleviate the pressure and tie off the burst vessel and siphon off the clotted blood—would have caused more damage to his brain than the hemorrhage. Tissue would have been inadvertently, unavoidably, removed. My father’s brain was no longer my father’s brain. And his body was no longer his body. If three weeks after surgery he was still in the ICU at Mass General and hadn’t been moved to a rehab facility, then there would be no recovery, no return. He was alive, thanks to modern medical technology and the surgical skills of Dr. Ralph Plummer, “the best in the business,” but he no longer had a life. Unless, of course, Mother was exaggerating.

  I realized that she had asked me a question and was waiting for an answer. “What?”

  “I said, ‘Why did you stop writing to us?’ I’m sorry to bring it up, but we worried so. And wondered. We wondered about your life, Hannah. Especially after you wrote us that you had married a man out there, a Libyan.”

  “Liberian.”

  “Yes. Liberian. Why did you stop answering my letters?”

  “What letters? I wrote you about Woodrow and said that I was pregnant, remember? After that I never heard from either of you. I know, I know, my tone was probably a little harsh, that’s the way I was in those days. But still—”

  “That’s not true, Hannah. For a long time, both your father and I wrote you. We did. And then he stopped. Because of his wounded pride. But I kept on for a long time, Hannah. Then I just sent cards, Christmas cards and birthday cards. Finally, I gave up, too.” She looked at her hands in puzzlement, as if trying to recognize whose they were. Then she looked at mine. “I see you’re wearing a wedding ring,” she said, almost wistfully.

  “Yes. All those letters and cards, were they addressed to Hannah Musgrave, Mother?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I’m not Hannah Musgrave. Haven’t been for years.”

  “You’re not?” Genuine astonishment. “Who are you, then?” Genuine curiosity.

  “Good question.” I got up and walked around the kitchen and poked into the cabinets, the refrigerator, even the freezer. Everything was the same and in the same place as when I last looked, fifteen years ago—the china, the glassware and silver, cutlery, pots and pans, the canned goods and packaged food. In fifteen years, nothing in this room had changed. I leaned against the counter, arms folded, and said, “I’m Missus Woodrow Sundiata. First name, Hannah. Mother of three sons, Dillon, William, and Paul. Or maybe over here I’m Dawn Carrington. That’s what my passport says, anyhow. A fugitive. Still underground.”

  “Three sons! Oh, my! I’m a grandmother!”

  “Yes, you are. Congratulations. But your letters and cards—if they were addressed to Hannah Musgrave and were mailed after I got married to Woodrow—disappeared, no doubt, into the famously inept Liberian postal system.”

  “That explains it, then,” she said brightly. “Your father, you know, made some inquiries a few years ago. He met someone in the foreign service, an American who was stationed out there; he met him in Washington once at some official State Department dinner and asked after you. Discreetly, of course.”

  “Of course. What’d he learn?”

  “Nothing. The man said he’d check when he returned to Liberia, which he did, and he wrote back to Daddy that there wasn’t any record of an American woman named Hannah Musgrave residing in Liberia. So we assumed that you’d left the country. We thought you might even be in the United States. Underground. Like before. And that we’d hear from you eventually. Like before. But, Hannah,” she said, smiling, her eyes suddenly glistening with apparent joy, “I’m a grandmother! How wonderful. Tell me about my grandsons. I’ll warm up Eleanor’s stroganoff for us,” she said, and went to the refrigerator, flipping the oven on as she passed the stove. “Tell me everything! Oh, if only Daddy could hear this. You’ll see him tomorrow, dear,” she said in a comforting tone, switching emotional levels too rapidly for me to keep up.

  I tried, however, and soon found myself switching topics with the same reckless abandon. I described Dillon first, his temperament and good looks, and then told her a little about our house on Duport Road, mentioning in passing that in 1976 I’d traveled from the States first to Ghana and then to Liberia on a phony passport, which I’d used when leaving Liberia and returning now to the States as well, and explained briefly and in a vague way why I’d been obliged to leave without my sons or husband, which utterly confused her. So I returned to my sons themselves, telling her about the twins, and then a little about the country itself and Woodrow’s family in Fuama, whom she thought “charming” and “interesting.”

  She asked me if I had pictures of Woodrow and the boys.

  “No. I mean, not with me.”

  “You don’t? Why on earth not, Hannah?”

  I had to think for a minute. “I stopped carrying pictures of family years ago, Mother. When I was underground.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes, when you were underground. Are you still underground, then?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  “Oh.”

  I told her about my work at the lab and how it had ended and then later had evolved into caretaking the chimps, which she also found “charming” and “interesting,” causing me to switch back to the subject of Woodrow and his precarious position with the government of Samuel Doe, without telling her what I knew about Samuel Doe, whom she knew as the more or less democratically elected, anti-communist leader of an African nation, someone much favored by the Reagan administration.

  “I read everything I can about Liberia,” she said. “The New York Times, of course, and just recently a novel by Graham Greene that was pretty depressing, to tell the truth, but it gave me the flavor of the place—”

  “The Heart of the Matter?”

  “Yes, I think that was it.”

  “That’s Sierra Leone, Mother. And a long time ago.”

  “Oh.”

  I asked her to tell me more about Daddy, his condition, the effects of the stroke and surgery. But it was almost as if she didn’t know the answers. She was as evasive and vague about his condition as I had been about Samuel Doe. She kept saying, “You’ll see tomorrow. I’ll arrange to have his doctors speak with you. He’s pretty incapacitated, dear, so prepare yourself. I always try to be cheerful and optimistic when I’m with him. But it’s difficult. And sometimes when I leave his room I just break down in tears. Shall I open a bottle of wine? It is a special occasion, after all. How about a special red?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Will he be able to recognize me?”

  “Oh, my goodn
ess,” she said and set napkins, plates, and silver on the table. “Of course, he will.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Mother and I drove into Boston, and before seeing Daddy, we met first with the surgeon, Dr. Plummer. I had insisted on it. I was still hoping that Mother had exaggerated the seriousness of Daddy’s condition. The surgeon strolled into the waiting room where we sat on overstuffed, turquoise easy chairs and stood over us, poking through a folder that I assumed was Daddy’s file. He was a Top Gun type, a forty-year-old athlete with a military buzz cut, titanium eyes, and a mouthful of very white teeth. He wore pressed chinos and a tight-fitting, navy blue polo shirt, all muscle and sinew and as clean as an action figure.

  “Looks like an intracerebral hemorrhage,” he said, shuffling through the papers as if reading them for the first time. “Big bleed. Caused probably by high blood pressure. That and blood vessels weakened by old age. The scans indicated the stroke was catastrophic.”

  “Catastrophic,” I said.

  “Yes.” He checked his watch.

  “That means he’ll die from it?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Mother interrupted.

  “Yeah, usually it does. With someone your father’s age, death usually occurs within a few hours of the event. Or at the most a few days.”

  “And when it doesn’t?” I asked.

  “Not my area,” he said.

  “Will he get better? Will his condition improve?”

  He glanced through the sheaf of papers. “Hard to say. Age’s against him. Guess he’s otherwise in good shape. Heart, lungs, et cetera. Once he’s in rehab, they’ll make an evaluation.”

  “How long might my father have to remain in intensive care?”

  “Not my area,” he said again. “Speak to the attending physician on that.” He checked the file again. “Doctor Rexroth.”

  “Freddie. Freddie Rexroth,” Mother said. “A dear.”

  “Surgery went okay, though. A case like this, we don’t like to opt for surgery. The age thing. A batch of tissue, brain tissue, always gets scraped off, no matter how good you are. And I’m good. Some guys want to try a spinal tap first. But with a lumbar puncture you can get cerebral herniation. Brain tissue, because of the pressure inside the skull, gets sucked through the transtentorial notch into the cerebellum and the stem. Bad news. So we opted to cut,” he said, closing the file with relish, as if the memory of the cutting had unexpectedly pleased him. “Anything else?” he asked, and smiled.

  “No,” I said.

  MOTHER ENTERED Daddy’s room ahead of me. “Good morning!” she chirped. “I’ve brought someone to see you, Bernard. And you’ll never guess who it is.” She waved me onto center stage. “Ta-da!”

  I came slowly forward and stood at the foot of his bed. His head was wrapped in a gauze turban. Wires monitored his heartbeat and blood pressure, and plastic tubes snaked in and out of his nostrils, mouth, and the veins of both wrists, pumping oxygen, nourishment, and medications into his body and removing spittle and phlegm and urine. My father’s heart, liver, and kidneys were strong. He had taken good care of his body and had exercised it regularly, drank moderately, never smoked. But he’d been attached to this elaborate apparatus for twenty days, and he probably looked the same today as he had when they first wheeled him in from the operating room. He’d look the same in twenty weeks. Twenty months. Twenty years. His body was outliving him.

  “Stand over here, dear,” Mother said, sotto voce. “On his right side. It’s his left that’s paralyzed, and they think his vision on that side is still impaired, too. Poor thing.”

  I obeyed and passed behind her. There were bars along the sides of his bed to keep him from tumbling out, but with all the tubes, cords, and wires, I couldn’t imagine him moving. His head was propped by a pillow, and he wore a white hospital gown. A tuft of gray chest hair fluttered above the collar of his gown. I avoided looking directly at his face, as if I knew I’d learn there a thing I did not want to know. The skin of his forearms and hands was like yellowed parchment. His fingernails were clean and professionally manicured.

  Finally, I dared to look at his face. And it was like seeing my father in his coffin, as if Mother and I were attending the funeral of Dr. Bernard Musgrave, my dead father, her late husband, who lay there with his eyes closed imitating sleep. The color of his face was a little too bright against the white background, and his chin and cheeks had been freshly shaved by a stranger, a patch of three-day grizzle missed here, another there. The hair keeps on growing after the rest of the body has died, doesn’t it? Like the fingernails and toenails. My father’s internal organs might still function, thanks to the machines attached to them, but it was the same sort of meaningless continuity as the ongoing growth of his beard and fingernails.

  “Look who I’ve brought!” Mother exclaimed. “Look, Bernard!”

  His eyes flashed open, then closed. “Let him be, Mother,” I said, turning to her, catching the anger on her face, shocked by it, but then, just as quickly, not shocked.

  “No, see, he’s awake,” she said.

  I turned back, and he was staring straight up, as if at the ceiling. “Hello, Daddy,” I whispered. “It’s me, Hannah.”

  “You’ll have to speak up. He isn’t wearing his hearing aid.”

  “Hearing aid? Daddy has a hearing aid?”

  “He’s had it for years, Hannah. But they won’t let him use it here. Because of the battery or something, with all the electronics,” she said and tossed a disdainful wave at the bank of blinking monitors.

  I reached down and touched his dry cheek. He watched my hand descend, but didn’t move his head. He still hadn’t looked at me. I was afraid to raise my voice, afraid it would crack, and I’d cry. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be tough, clear headed, rational. I knew what I was supposed to feel; I needed to know what to think. I couldn’t count on Mother for guidance; she had neither feelings, with the probable exception of anger, nor thoughts, except for a set of self-revising strategies for attention.

  “Bernard!” she said in a loud voice. “Look who I brought to see you! It’s Hannah, Bernard!” Then, in a stage whisper, “It’s the medication. He’s very heavily sedated, you know.”

  I positioned myself directly over him, cutting off his view of the ceiling, and saw my face reflected in the pupils of his eyes. For a long moment, we stared at each other like that, unblinking, dry eyed, as if staring into the distance through fog. But we were only inches away from what we were trying to see in each other’s eyes, the thing that had always been there, from my infancy on. I can remember it from almost that far back, when he would look down at me in my crib, and we would fix our gazes on one another’s eyes. I saw him, and at the same time in the same way, he saw me, and in that instant he and I became real to one another and to ourselves. By that means we both came into existence. My father had given life to me, whether by accident or intention, it didn’t matter; and I had given it back to him, an exchange begun probably at my birth.

  It was an exchange from which Mother had been excluded. Not because Daddy or I wished it, but because we both knew that she was incapable of truly seeing anyone, even herself. All my life, whenever I tried to see into my mother’s eyes, I saw two tiny, mirrored disks that bounced my gaze back at me. I never shared with Mother the eye contact that secures for you the knowledge that you are as real as the world itself, as certain of your own existence, regardless of its meaninglessness and contingency, as you are of the world’s. The opacity of my mother’s gaze deprived me of that certitude and security and made me resemble her from time to time in ways that would later shame me. And by now you know some of those ways. How I saw, or more precisely, how I did not see, my sons, for instance. Or my husband. It wasn’t as though I could have seen them, if only I’d tried. Like my mother, I was incapable of seeing them. It was beyond my capacity. Woodrow was always my black African husband, Woodrow. He was never simply Woodrow. And my sons were my black African husband’s three sons. The eldest and the twins. They
were never Dillon, William, and Paul. It’s why I was able to leave them with such ease and so little regret. Simply, they weren’t as real to me as I was to myself. They weren’t even as real to me as my dreamers. Not until later, much later. And by then it was too late.

  And now my father was no longer real to me, except in memory. A dry, white crust of spittle was stuck to a corner of his mouth. I wet my fingertips and washed it off. His face was the one I’d known all my life, but it wasn’t my father’s face anymore; it belonged to one of my ancestors, a pale, lipless Puritan with a beaked nose and cold blue eyes. It was more a mask than a face. A death mask. I made one last attempt to see if the person peering through the eye holes was still alive, and I said, “Daddy, are you in there?”

  “Speak loudly,” Mother said. “He can’t hear you. The hearing aid.”

  I turned and said, “Mother, just shut the fuck up.”

  She looked scared, as if I’d struck her, and pasted a thin smile onto her lips and, with thumb and forefinger, mimed locking her mouth with a key and throwing the key away. The sickly smile and her rage-filled eyes made her look like a happy executioner. Is this my mother? Is this who she really is?

  “Leave us alone for a few minutes, okay? Why don’t you see if Doctor Rexroth is in the building. We should speak with him later.”

  She nodded, turned, and left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

  I leaned down and reconnected my gaze to my father’s, as if resuming a deeply familiar ceremony that had been briefly disrupted by an erratic member of the congregation, someone with a coughing fit who had politely removed herself from the hall. I kissed his forehead, and his eyes slowly closed. “Hello, Daddy,” I said. You’re not going to recover from this, Daddy. You’re not coming back to us. It took too long for Mother to get help, too long to get you onto the operating table, too long for me to come home. And now it’s too late for me to be of any use to you. Too late for me to thank you for loving me. You loved me almost in spite of yourself. But it was enough to make me capable of being thankful, at least, no matter how late it’s come. I am who I am at bottom and who I am not because of who you and Mother were and were not. It’s because of who you were, Daddy, that I’m able to be someone at all. If I hadn’t had you, if all I’d had was Mother, I would be her. I’d be no one. An absence. You saved me from that, Daddy. You—